


I Break That Way

by insideimfeelindirty



Series: Where's My Love [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Accidental Pregnancy, Angst, Anxiety, Depression, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Kid Fic, Postpartum Depression, Pregnancy, an unholy amount of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2016-11-12
Packaged: 2018-08-30 14:19:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8536453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/insideimfeelindirty/pseuds/insideimfeelindirty
Summary: Clarke's life after Bellamy.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, so this is the last instalment of the Dead Bellamy series, I promise. There is only so much pain I can take. It hurt to write this series.  
> I don't have any personal experience with dead lovers, birth, postpartum depression or post-post-apocalyptic earth, so forgive me any glaring mistakes.  
> Please do let me know what you think though, I've never written anything quite like this before. Kudos is great, comments is even better <3

 

Time moves in fits and starts. Her body changes and grows and her heart struggles through it, aching and swelling with loss and hope. Weeks pass that she can barely remember, each day melding into the next in its monotony. Then there are days where she can practically recount each minute. 

 

The first day she feels a flutter deep in her belly is one of those days where the world suddenly comes back into focus. She’s forcing down a particularly stubborn meal of beans and unidentifiable protein when there is a slight movement, almost like a soft pop. She ignores it, puts it down to the stodgy rations they have been trying to get used to. But then she feels it again and she suddenly remembers.

 

That day was the first time she smiled again, even though it was brittle and didn’t quite reach her eyes. 

 

Other times she’s stuck in a vacuum, waiting, existing. Remembering.  

 

She has no real function here at the bunker as they wait out radiation and try to imagine a future on the outside. She can’t help Raven or Monty as they run risk analyses and Kane seems to have settled back into the Chancellor role well. She occasionally attends meetings to try and build bridges between the clans, but without Bellamy there to pull her back it often disintegrates into shouting matches and she knows she’s more of a hindrance than help. She tried to help her mother and Jackson in the infirmary but Abby is worried her immune system has been compromised by radiation exposure so even there she is useless. 

 

So she spends most of her time alone with her brain and her memories. He is still a fixed presence in her mind, bitter tears still burning her cheeks. Sometimes his presence is soft, like a whisper, light fingertips running up her swollen body reassuringly, as if he was really there with her. Other times  it’s unbearable, painful, like nails scraping loudly against a blackboard, a dark reminder that he is missing from her. Sometimes even breathing is hard. 

 

She doesn’t share her thoughts with anyone, even if she knows they still feel his loss keenly too. She thinks maybe she’s not supposed to take it this hard, they weren’t officially together after all, even though her own body is growing in contradiction to that instinct. They never really started like she always figured they would. She always thought they’d have more time. 

 

* * *

 

She cries all the way through her labour, screaming for him, begging for him. Octavia clutches her hand tightly but her eyes are red and wet and pained with should’ve beens. 

 

She gives up several times, her mind betraying her body, shame spreading through her with a warm flush. After every tough decision and every impossible situation she has clawed her way out of in her life, giving birth is what finally brings her to her knees. Her mouth is full of cant’s and wont’s, but in the end her body takes over and follows each surge and wave.

 

It goes on for longer than she ever imagined, her throat raw and her eyes blinded by fat, warm tears. Her mother’s voice is a soothing but determined backdrop, but her eyes are black and heavy. Her hair sticks to the sides of her head and she has a wild look in her eyes that she hasn’t seen since that day up in the tower in Polis, like she’d do anything to take on the pain herself.

 

She is barely lucid towards the end, conjuring up his voice and his touch in her mind. She imagines his soothing, warm palms running over her forehead instead of Octavia's small, cool hands.  She hears him tell her she can do it, they can do it, _together._ His voice is soft but worried, his eyes round and wet and filled with warmth. She gathers the last shreds of strength and long forgotten determination and bears down.

 

Finally, finally a loud cry pieces the air, angry and insistent, fighting and surviving. Just like she has since she landed on earth. Someone tells her it’s a  girl, but she barely hears it. She already knew it would be. She reaches out blindly, and finds a tiny, red body twisting in indignation thrust into her arms.

 

She can barely make her daughter out through the tears, but she sees a mass of black hair and a flash of dark eyes beneath slits that are almost closed up. She can’t blame her for being so angry, for being so riled up about being brought into this world. Eventually they both calm down, breathing through their shared trauma, staring at each other like there is nothing in the world but the two of them. She is exhausted and delirious, but she knows she’d fight until every single bone in her body was broken to protect her child.  

 

“He should be here,” she whispers, not managing to tear her eyes away from the way her baby’s arms flit jerkily around her face. 

 

“He is,” Octavia insists with a watery smile and a hitch to her voice. 

 

The air feels heavy with loss, with the significance of a moment he would have fought not to have missed hanging like a storm cloud above them, full and ready to burst.

 

She lets Abby pry the baby away from her so she can be cleaned and checked over and takes a moment to really look at Octavia. She looks wrecked, guilty even. Octavia, she realises, has lost so much. She lost Lincoln, and along with him the thing that still tethered her to her innocence. She lost Bellamy before she even lost him properly, she pushed him away when all she had was anger and pain and nowhere to direct it. She never got to tell him he was the only good she had left in her life. 

 

She reaches out and grabs Octavia’s hand, squeezing her hand tight.

 

“You thought of a name for her yet?"

 

She’d spent many nights thinking about names, imagining what they would have agreed on together. 

 

“I wanted something that he would’ve picked,” she admits, letting her mother place a freshly cleaned baby back in her arms. She looks so much more like him than her, and it makes her heart swell painfully. 

 

“Terra.” She tests the name on her tongue, and even if it’s the first time she’s said it out loud it seems to fit perfectly. The bundle in her arms is calm and sleepy, happily accepting the legacy. 

 

“Terra? As in the Roman goddess?” Octavia’s eyes are glassy, full of old memories.

 

“Of course. The Goddess of the Earth."

 

The room goes quiet for a moment, all of them, now a true family. They let the significance of this new life created out of desperation and impossible circumstance justify all the tough choices they’ve had to make to get here. They let the significance of what she represents fill them with a sense of accomplishment, of having done something right at least. This is what they’ve been fighting for all along - a future.  

 

“He would’ve liked that,” Octavia finally says, quietly and with reverence. 

 

She tries not to let tears drop on her daughters head, but in the end she doesn’t seem to mind anyway. 

 

* * *

 

Her daughter is a good baby. She sleeps, she eats, she lets everyone hold her without protest. She is like her father in the way nothing ever seems to throw her off, calmly accepting her role as the natural centre of the small universe they have found in the bunker. 

 

Everyone is as fiercely in love with Terra as she is, cooing over her with glistening eyes and wide smiles, peppering her with sloppy kisses which she just accepts with barely a blink of an eye. They all melt and soften around her, as if all the pain and loss they have endured finally has meaning. 

 

Everything is fine, until it isn’t. Terra is two months old and progressing as she should when suddenly she looks at her daughter and feels entirely overwhelmed. Cold rises up her back and grips her neck, and her hands still on the tiny, plump figure beneath them. She looks at her tiny fists, her chubby cheeks and her dark, familiar eyes and she has no idea if she can give her a future at all. She looks at her toothless gums and the tiny spit bubbles popping out from perfect pink lips and she is convinced she will fail her daughter. 

 

She stops being able to sleep between night time feeds, staying awake just watching her daughter's little body rise and fall with even breaths and then panicking when she wakes up worrying she doesn’t know what to do or how to cope. She starts to cry when Terra cries, even though she knows her different cries so well by now that she knows she’s just tired, hungry or cranky. Still, she can’t help the big fat tears that fill her eyes and turn her cheeks into swollen riverbeds. She can’t help the despair that creeps into her bones and the gnawing feeling that she alone isn’t enough, that Terra is missing something vital she can never give her. 

 

During the day she plasters on a bright smile and tells everyone she’s just tired, and it’s an easy explanation for why she is suddenly distracted, zoning out of conversations and forgetting what they were talking about two minutes ago. It’s an easy explanation for why she picks at the food on her plate and leaves most of it untouched. It’s an easy explanation for why she prefers to let anyone else pick Terra up when she fusses or let her mother or Octavia take her off her hands while she goes to lie down on her bunk bed by herself. 

 

She doesn’t sleep though, exhausted as she is. She lies on the bed and stares at the infinite concrete ceiling and for the first time she’s glad Bellamy’s not here. She’s glad he doesn’t have to see her like this, that he doesn’t have to see what a bad mother she is. She can practically see the hurt in his eyes, feel his disappointment in her, sense him distancing himself from her.

 

He would have been an incredible father, much better than she could ever hope to be. He’d be able to handle Terra’s worst tantrums, his big hands engulfing her and soothing her instantly. He’d be able to handle her crying for hours without becoming unhinged, not like her who can’t even handle Terra at her best behaviour. It drags her down further, knowing she’s letting them both down.

 

Five sleepless weeks later, she’s dead on her feet and teetering on the edge. She’s trying to get Terra to latch on, which is never usually a problem, but they’re both irritable and tired and her screams get angrier and angrier the hungrier she gets. She pleads and shushes and rocks but Terra is having none of it. Finally, she gives up, places her in her cot and leaves her daughter to cry. She storms out of the room, slinking down on the cool floor in the corridor and she lets go. Her body heaves with breathless sobs and she presses her hands against her ears to block out Terra’s furious screams, her heart beating a bloody riot. She closes her eyes, never wanting to open them again. 

 

She cries and Terra cries, like they’re competing for who the world owes the most. She cries until her throat is raw and her eyes are swollen shut, she cries until Terra’s cries dies down to whimpers. She cries until her lungs scream and her ears ring, and she doesn’t stop until Raven pulls her into her strong arms and just holds her. She’s been fighting for every moment of her existence down here on Earth, but now all the fight’s gone out of her. 

 

They sit on the floor for what seems like hours in silence, Raven shushing her gently, her crying slowly calming to a trickle. She is vaguely aware that Terra’s stopped crying, hushed voices coming from their room.

 

“I love her so much,” she starts, because she does, it’s the only thing that has kept her going all this time. “But I just can’t be happy, I don’t know how."

 

“I think you’re afraid to be happy, because every time you’re happy something bad happens,” Raven whispers, voice thick with emotion.

 

Every happy moment she has experienced down here is tarred black with death and pain and loss, and she thought she knew death well, after her dad, after Wells, after Finn, after Lexa. It got under her skin, lived inside her like a cancer. But then she lost Bellamy, then lost him again when she found out her child would grow up without her father. And then Terra came, and it was love like she’s never experienced before, unconditional and consuming, but it’s a love that lives in her head and not in her bones. She’s numb to it, she can’t feel it.

 

“I don’t remember what it feels like not to be broken.” She swallows hard against the guilt that wracks her bones, against the darkness that is threatening to consume her.

 

Raven strokes her hair softly, pressing her cheek up against her tear stained one. It feels terrifying and cathartic to show her all her broken bones like this, to show her the gaping wound that has been just below the surface this whole time. 

 

“It’s ok,” Raven soothes, rocking her slowly. “It’s ok to say that you’re not ok."

 

And she’s not. She hasn’t been for a while. 

 

* * *

She wakes up the next day groggy and heavy, the fog hanging over her thick and disorientating. She sits up on the bed slowly, gingerly, the hefty cocktail of drugs her mother administered still making her lethargic. She’s not sure how long she’s slept, but having slept at all feels like a victory in itself. The room is quiet and dark, and she is slow to react to the unfamiliarity of it, to the missing puzzle piece. Terra is not in her cot. 

 

Almost immediately guilt floods her, for having abandoned her, _their,_ daughter. She rushes down the corridor, panicked and ashamed, all relief from having finally managed to sleep pushed aside. She finds her daughter safely in her grandmother’s arms, happily gurgling and smiling her big toothless smile as Abby blows raspberries on her chubby cheeks and Marcus grins widely at them both. 

 

Immediately her eyes fill with tears again, feeling like an utter failure, the darkness threatening to pull her back down. 

 

“Hey, hey,” her mother soothes when she spots her, quickly handing Terra over to Marcus and rushing to her side. “Don’t do this to yourself, don’t beat yourself up."

 

“How long was I out for?"

 

There is a tremble in her voice she can’t keep out, a desperation she can’t hide from her mother. 

 

“You were out for as long as you needed to,” she says, voice determined, then softer. “You should’ve told me how you were feeling."

 

“Mom, I-i.. just couldn’t.” She can't put words to it, to the shame and guilt, to what feels like her greatest failure. She feels like her own instincts are working against her, biology playing her a cruel trick. "I’m not supposed to feel like this."

 

Abby takes a deep breath, her eyes big and weary. 

 

“Listen, you won’t always get it right. You’ll make mistakes, big ones and small ones.”

 

A tight-lipped smile flashes across her face before falling away, memories of her own big mistakes still hanging over her. 

 

“Don’t let the mistakes define you. Bad moments don’t make you a bad mother. I look at you now and all I see are the things I did right."

 

“Terra deserves better than me,” she insists, though with less conviction in her voice than in her head. “She deserves Bellamy."

 

“Hey, Terra is absolutely fine,” Abby says firmly, nodding her head over to the other side of the room where Marcus and Terra are cooing at each other in the most ridiculous way. “She will be fine. Because she has you. If Bellamy were still here he’d tell you the same. No-one believed in you more than he did, not even me."

 

Her inhale is shaky and her eyes well up again at her mother’s words, at the ever-present backdrop of her loss and grief.

 

“You will feel like yourself again, even though that might seem impossible right now."

 

It takes a while for her mother’s words to come true. It takes weeks of pushing guilt to the side and accepting more help than she wants. It’s weeks of giving in to Abby’s insistence that she leave Terra with her every other night while she forces herself to sleep, until she doesn’t have to force it, until she can sleep between nightly feeds again. 

 

It’s weeks of forcing worry down, of telling herself that she can be enough, that she is enough. It’s weeks of waking up thinking she doesn’t know how to do it, but doing it anyway. It’s weeks of telling herself it’s ok to cry and to not always know instantly how to calm Terra down. After a while the tears don’t come so easily and the calmer she is, the calmer Terra is. The less she questions her own abilities as a mother, the less anxiety manages to take a hold of her. 

 

Eventually it starts to feel like the fog is lifting. She can look at Terra and simply enjoy the daily progress she’s making, laugh at the new sounds she comes up with and smile when she cracks her wide, toothless grin. She can marvel at the way she looks more and more like her father every day, the way her black hair grows thicker and curlier, the way her defined lips follow the exact same curve as his did. 

 

It’s weeks after her break down when she’s feeding Terra and suddenly realises that she’s fallen asleep, her tiny mouth slack against her breast. She looks down at her daughter, blissfully satisfied and oblivious, her miniature fingers wrapped tightly around her index finger. And then she feels it, the love she knew in her mind was there, spreading though her bones like molten lava, warming her from the core, spreading a wide smile across her face. 

 

It’s a lot, it’s a lot more than she ever thought it would be. She had no idea it could be so beautiful, loving like this, without reservation or condition, so profoundly. It’s the same as loving Bellamy in its intensity, but it’s different in its selflessness. And it occurs to her that life is his final gift to her, the only thing he could give her that would last forever, even after they are both gone. They made her, _they_ made this beautiful creature that is an amalgamation of her and him, but Terra made her a mother. And as much as she hates that he’s gone, she’ll always be grateful to him for that gift.

 

 

* * *

It’s supposed to be spring outside when they finally decide radiation levels have decayed enough to venture beyond the doors again. Raven is the one to pull the lever this time, the heavy metal doors creaking and protesting as they slowly spring open. The glare of daylight is disorientating in is brightness, their eyes having become accustomed to the poorly lit bunker for all these months. But beyond the light, she thinks she can see green.

 

Fresh air hits her, sweet and wet, and it feels like the very first time the doors to the drop ship opened. She’d been scared and disorientated then, but he’d looked over his shoulder and smirked at her and all she wanted to do was smack that cocky grin off his face, and she’d forgotten all about being scared. 

 

This time, it’s Terra’s wide grin she sees as she turns back towards her, taking her first unstable steps on real ground with her hand in her grandmother’s. Her whole face crinkles with her smile, like Bellamy’s did. Her now full head of black curls is quickly turned into an unruly mess by the soft breeze outside, like Bellamy’s often did. Her eyes are soft and brown and happy, none of the pain and guilt her father always carried in his evident. 

 

“Mommy!” she calls, and beckons for her to join them on the grass outside. Her heart lurches at the sight of her daughter’s pure delight at discovering the world outside the concrete walls which have been her entire world up until now.

 

Outside is nothing like she expected. When they went in the world was dying, black and grey and lifeless, mayhem circling in the clouds above them. Post-post-apocalypse Earth has bounced back, luminous green grass stretching its promising blanket as far as the eye can see. The clouds above are paper thin and soft, no destructive energy left in them. Beyond the sky is blue and the sun is warming, there is even the occasional chirp of birds from beyond the tree line. The air is light with hope and possibility, like the future they have been fighting for is within reach. 

 

Terra is jubilant and full of energy, pulling Abby along after her to look at ever new discoveries. She stumbles after insects, peals of bubbling laughter escaping her as she plops down to feel the grass slip through her fingers. She watches her daughter from a distance, arms folded over herself. It’s an image that seemed impossible to hope for, this relaxed, easy happiness that floods her. It’s a dream that she never dared believe would come true, after the long nightmare that came before. 

 

Her eyes flicker to the side of the entrance, to the spot her whole body is drawn to. The ground is slightly raised in that spot, covered in grass but still visibly divergent from the rest of the landscape. She sinks down on the grass next to the mound, leaning back against the concrete wall. She takes a deep, shaky breath, picking up one of the tiny white flowers pushing through the dirt. The flowers dot the spot where he finally settled, echoing the freckles that punctuated his face. 

 

He wasn’t her first love, and she wasn’t his. He wasn’t the first she looked at with a mouth full of forevers. He’d felt the sharp sting of loss just like she had, and maybe, like her, he’d already given up that love would come again. But then it did, in the middle of the night, unannounced and unassuming, but with a force that should have been louder than any storm they had weathered together. And as brief as their time together was it felt  more significant than all her previous experiences combined. And she wishes more than anything that she had found him sooner, so she could’ve loved him longer. 

 

She looks around her, flower twirling between her fingers. Terra is still bounding around, elated by the world that is wide open at her feet. Octavia is standing in the middle of the field alone, eyes closed to the sun as it warms her face, small smile stretched across her face. Raven is laughing giddily, arms open to the sky and twirling around not caring if she bumps into Jasper or Monty. Bryan and Miller stand slightly away from the group, arms around each other, talking quietly but with soft smiles on their faces. Marcus slides an arm around Abbby’s waist, pressing a soft kiss on her forehead. 

 

Terra stumbles over to her, sinking down onto her lap and snuggling close. She runs her fingers over her hair, smiling at how quickly the world has exhausted her senses, imagining his fingers following her movement. This is the legacy Bellamy died for. A future for his friends. A future for her. A future for his people. And even though Terra will never know her father, there is so much of him in her already that he’ll never be far from her.

 

His fingerprints will never fade from the lives he touched. 

 

 

 


End file.
